How to come up with Good Ideas for a Business
Are you a first time entrepreneur? Never started a project before? Don’t bother reading the rest of this post. Spend 30-60 minutes thinking about something that bothers you and come up with a way to fix it. Congratulations, you came up with your first business. Is it a good business? Who knows. It doesn’t matter because the skills you learn are infinitely more valuable than whatever oyur idea was. whatever your idea was.
Dedicate time: Coming up with good ideas is a skill. It takes time and practice. You should set aside, 1-2 hours, once a month and just think. Have a piece of paper, notepad, whatever in front of you, but no phone or distractions. At the end, copy whatever you have into a journal.
Just came across this, which I wrote 2 years before the iPhone launched. This test would cause fatalities now. pic.twitter.com/c3E86wvBP0
— Paul Graham (@paulg) January 25, 2022Set the Scope: What kind of idea are you trying to come up with? Are you trying to build passive income, 10k MRR or a billion dollar company? These are the questions you need to be asking yourself. If you are trying to build a billion dollar company then whatever you are thinking of should be 10x better than anything else that exists out there. If you are trying to build a 10k MRR project that is good too, but realize the scope of your idea. It helps to stay motivated when you have realistic expectations. Don’t be one of those people who thinks they are going to be a billionaire off their next online form builder.
Inspiration: Should come from within. It is easy to be excited about an idea, but unless it is solving a daily pain or something you can connect deeply with, than its hard to keep the motivation. Having background knowledge about the domain of the idea is nice, but not a must have. I would argue that sometimes not having domain knowledge is an advantage.
Validation: You can write an entire book on how to validate your ideas. I will definitely have a post or two about how to do that in the future.